Edge AI and IoT for smart sustainable transportation: Real-time renewable energy optimization – A comprehensive review

The adoption rate of electric mobility, renewable energy systems, and smart transportation infrastructures has exacerbated the demand for real-time, high-performance and energy-efficient systems. While high latency, low bandwidth, and low responsiveness are commonly encountered drawbacks in existing cloud-based energy optimization techniques used in these mobility-driven systems. The deployment of Edge AI and IoT technologies will pave the path to efficient, low-latency and real-time distributed renewable energy optimization within the smart sustainable transportation system. This paper presents a detailed survey on the latest trends in AI based renewable energy integration, smart grid, EV, battery management systems, and real-time transportation data analytics. The application of deep learning, reinforcement learning, federated learning, and predictive analytics toward improved renewable energy generation forecasting, smart charging, load balancing, and Vehicle-to-Grid (V2G) co-ordination is also elaborated. Edge computing platforms and IoT devices can support a high-performance real-time monitoring, predictive maintenance and a self-sufficient energy distribution network for smart transportation. The experimental validation on contemporary research works reveal an average 70% reduction in transmission latency, more than 50% increase in the renewable energy consumption, approximately 30% increase in battery lifetime, and nearly 80% reduction in charging infrastructure offline duration for edge systems with AI assistance. Important concerns regarding the edge system’s security, scale-ability, connectivity, privacy, and the direction of future research on enabling smart transportation were also discussed.